Articulation, orchestration

Aarik Danielsen

Sunday

Aug 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMAug 30, 2009 at 5:00 AM

When we run our eyes across a painting, we make immediate, visceral decisions about what we like and don’t like. What it reminds us of and what it represents. Composition is an artistic element key to creating those impressions. Its importance is often intuited but less often mentioned.

What: “Concerning Composing” by Matthew Ballou and David Spear

Where: 812 E. Broadway

When: Show runs from Tuesday to Sept. 28. An artists’ reception is from 5 to 7 p.m. Sept. 10.

Web site: www.perlow-stevensgallery.com

“The composition leads your eye around; the composition takes you throughout the course of the entire painting and brings you from one thing to another,” said Spear, a local painter and graduate student.

Spear is teaming up with University of Missouri art Professor Matthew Ballou to bring composition to the forefront with the show “Concerning Composing” in the alcove of PS:Gallery. The show opens Tuesday and runs through Sept. 28 at 812 E. Broadway. A reception for the artists is from 5 to 7 p.m. Sept. 10.

Patrons are not the only ones who take composition for granted. Artists can, too — in creating the works seen in this show, both artists journeyed down what Ballou called “paths of challenging our assumptions and challenging our solutions,” resolved to avoid “solving the composition in the exact way essentially every time.”

Many of Spear’s paintings — which can be seen all over town in restaurants like Sophia’s and Addison’s as well as at MU’s Memorial Union and Boone Hospital Center — are intricate, detailed works. This exhibit allowed Spear to paint more abstractly and “let the brush loose,” he said.

“I kind of think about it in terms of dislocating the hand,” Ballou added, referring to the way the hand symbolically, and literally, serves to represent the way an artist might fashion images similarly time after time — much as a person’s handwritten capital and lowercase letters might take on a consistent look.

Wrestling with the question of whether spirituality was present in his work, Spear investigated historical compositions that had long fascinated him. Making more than 60 pen-and-ink sketches of these works, he studied them for answers. Spear returned time and again to the work of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, especially his “The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus.” Spear created a series of monotypes — painting the images on a Plexiglas plate and using a press to transfer them to the paper — in an attempt to wrap his head around Rubens’ approach to composition.

Ballou’s contribution, a grouping he calls the Quintessence Series, is based around Plato’s notion that the dodecahedron, a geometric figure, represents the physical shape of the universe. Ballou layered multiple woodblock prints of the figure, joining them with various monotypes as well as drawn and painted elements.

Beyond their mutual respect for each other, Ballou and Spear point to a number of shared fundamentals that unify their seemingly disparate work: the use of saturated color, the interplay between sharply defined and broad elements and a concentration on radial symmetry — the idea of positioning like parts around a central point.

Certainly, both artists attach a common emphasis to composition. Ballou, who completed his graduate study at Indiana University, was very influenced by the school’s emphasis on density, which he defines as “the will to construct something so totally that you’re thinking about every square inch.”

“You are actively involved with every square inch, and every square inch matters to the composition,” he said. “That’s the perspective on composition that I came out of — you have to be responsible for it all, and you have to orchestrate it all, that it has to be articulated, that you don’t want to let stuff just happen. You want to be aware of it, and you want to know about it. You want it to be thoughtful.”

Spear affirmed that composition has always been his “primary focus.” In his installations, he considers not only how to “orchestrate” each painting but how the piece will “play in the setting that they’re going to be in, to add harmony and balance to the space.”

Jennifer Perlow, co-owner and curator of PS:Gallery, said she hasn’t previously grouped a show around “any single art component or art rule.” Perlow is eager to see the public interact with this exhibit, to “pull out the similarities and note the differences” in the work of artists who, stylistically, “you wouldn’t necessarily pair … immediately.”

“I always get excited when there’s intelligent conversation about art. … I’m hoping that people will really come in and take an opportunity to discuss this with their friends and with me, or with David and Matt during the opening,” she said.

You also can learn more about Spear and Ballou on their personal Web sites at alleywayarts.com and www.eikonktizo.com, respectively.

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